The Death Lineup

Golden State trail two games to one, and they have no answer.

Cleveland have been playing five against eight since the series began — Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love are injured, LeBron James is carrying an entire offense on his own, and it is working anyway. David Blatt slows the tempo, burns the clock, turns every possession into a wrestling match. It is exactly the basketball the Warriors do not know how to play.

Steve Kerr is coaching his first season. He has sixty-seven wins behind him and the nagging sense that none of it will count if he loses here. The night before the game he makes the decision that will be quoted for a decade: pull Andrew Bogut, his starting centre, and put in Andre Iguodala, a reserve who has not started a single game all regular season. Draymond Green, six foot six, slides to the five.

The choice is told today as a stroke of genius. At the time it is a desperate gamble, and Kerr himself has acknowledged it came from a suggestion by Nick U'Ren, a twenty-eight-year-old video assistant.

Historic decisions never look like historic decisions while you are making them.

The turning point is not a shot. It is a tempo.

For three quarters there is not much to see. Cleveland hold. Timofey Mozgov, the Russian centre nobody expected to matter, scores at will in a paint left empty: he will finish as the game's leading scorer with twenty-eight points. The Cavaliers take the third quarter twenty-eight to twenty-two and still believe.

It is the last time in this game.

What the death lineup does to an opponent cannot be read in any single possession, it is read in the fatigue. Five players switching everything, so no defensive breather. Five players who can shoot, so no help available. On every possession LeBron has to create alone, against a fresh defender, on a floor that no longer has anywhere to rest.

The fourth quarter ends twenty-seven to twelve.

The detail that says everything is Mozgov. Twenty-eight points, the best night of his career, handed to him, with no consequence whatsoever. The game has moved somewhere he cannot follow. Golden State did not work out how to guard him: they decided he no longer mattered.

103-82. The series is level.

That starting five made the centre position negotiable across the entire league.

In the five years that followed, every team went looking for its own Draymond Green: a big man too short for the position, smart enough to hold it anyway. Careers built on classical centre play stopped dead. Players once dismissed as too slight became starters. Basketball began to look like what happened in Cleveland that night.

Andre Iguodala would end the series as Finals MVP. The first player to take that trophy without having started a single regular season game. That is not a statistical curiosity: it is proof that a role can matter more than a status.

And it is the direct starting point for everything else. The confidence born in this game produces the seventy-three-win season. That season produces the impossible expectations of 2016, therefore the fall told on the Cavaliers page, therefore Kevin Durant's arrival.

A change of starting lineup decided the night before, by a rookie coach, on an idea from a video assistant.